The 924 Rallye can be considered the ancestor of all competition 924s. At the end of 1978 Juergen Barth, Roland Kussmaul and Helmut Ristl decided to privately develop a racing version of the 924 which until then had found only a few sporadic competitive uses. The Gr.4 homologation of the 924 Turbo did not come in time for the 1979 Monte Carlo Rally, so that the promoters of the project had to be content with using the naturally aspirated engine. From Safari, however, the 924 Rallye was able to use the turbo engine. The 924 Rallye was important because there were experimented with different solutions soon used on both the road and racing 924 Carrera GT's.